SSRS renders DateTime and floating-point values according a given Culture depending on
- the Language definition of the report
- the browser’s language settings
- URL parameters
- the current day of week (and whether DST applies or not)
as stated in this TechNet article.
This is all a bit unreliable for my taste, so I looked for a more deterministic method to generate my reports. (I need to add that the reports I am working on already required a “language” parameter, since the data is stored in several languages, and the language parameter is needed to generate the correct data set.)
Solution 1: add a CultureInfo parameter
I added a text parameter name CultureInfo to the .rdl that requires the user to input a CultureInfo value (such as en-us, or de-de, etc.). For this CultureInfo value to be used as default format provider for the report, we need to assign the report’s Language property:
- select the report by clicking outside the page area in designer mode
- go to the property sheet, select “Language”
- click the dropdown button, select “<Expression…>”
- enter “=Parameters!CultureInfo.Value”
When previewing or running the modified report, the CultureInfo parameter needs to be set, and datetime and float values are displayed according to the culture’s formats.
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